Corporations often empower employees to execute purchase transactions on behalf of the company in the course of day-to-day operations. Such purchases may include, for example, office supplies, client entertainment, travel expenses, and/or the like. It is generally accepted among businesses that the most convenient and safe manner for providing this empowerment is through opening a corporate transaction card account. Through a centralized corporate account, the employer may disperse any desired number of transaction cards to its workforce. However, tracking spending and reconciling accounting systems for a large number of corporate transaction cards is most often a time consuming and error prone task.
Traditionally, corporate accounting departments have relied on spending disclosure among each card carrying employee. Disclosure policies vary among corporations. For example, some may require the employee to submit a receipt and description of the charge following each purchase transaction. Others may require the employee to turn in receipts and a spending report at the end of each month. In either case, the accounting department is charged with the task of matching each billing statement entry with a corresponding receipt and/or entry in a spending report.
Regardless of policy, accounting departments regularly assign descriptive elements to the transactions listed in a billing statement in order to properly account for the purchases. Presently, most of the details are added to the statement after the purchase has been made and the transaction details are reviewed. However, this can be unreliable and resource intensive, especially in environments incurring a high level of transaction card spend. As such, there is a need for a system and method for performing highly reliable, pre-reconciliation of transactions by assigning an appropriate descriptive element to a single-use account number prior to its use. Such system may use preconfigured descriptive elements to match charges appearing within a billing statement with descriptive elements to present the corporation with a reconciled transaction to the business.